Advocates: Methane proposal has loopholes
Environmentalists say draft plan on emissions could exempt many producers in San Juan, Permian
Environmentalists say draft rules meant to curb methane emissions in New Mexico are a step in the right direction, but they fear loopholes could allow oil and gas companies to keep ejecting significant volumes of the potent greenhouse gas.
Environmental advocates and a scientist focused on reducing atmospheric methane argue exemptions in the proposed state rules are so colossal they could leave out many oil and gas operations in the San Juan Basin. Facilities in the more oilrich Permian Basin also could meet criteria for exemptions, allowing them to avoid requirements to reduce other air pollutants associated with methane and to increase reporting on emissions — practices meant to be a linchpin of the new rules.
“We are still crunching the numbers and hope this is just a drafting error and easily fixed, but it appears that unless clarified, the loopholes could
leave substantial numbers of wells across New Mexico unchecked,” said Jon Goldstein of the Environmental Defense Fund.
State officials maintain the rules would effectively reduce emissions.
Maddy Hayden, a spokeswoman for the New Mexico Environment Department, said the agency welcomes “all constructive feedback.” It worked hard to create regulations that would “result in significant reductions to harmful emissions,” she added.
Related rules crafted by the Oil Conservation Division would give state regulators broad enforcement authority, said Susan Torres, a spokeswoman for the Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department.
The rules would allow the agency to limit oil production, “withhold or deny drilling permits, revoke the authorization to transport … or assess civil penalties, all strong enforcement mechanisms for noncompliance with methane capture,” Torres said.
The department “is committed to holding the oil and gas industry accountable,” she added.
Robert McEntyre, a spokesman for the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, said in a statement the industry group is taking its time to analyze the proposal and will be offering formal comments on it in the coming weeks.
“Portions of the draft rule had not been highlighted” in Methane Advisory Panel discussions that led up to the rules, “so our scientific and technical experts are closely studying these developments to provide feedback,” McEntyre said.
Environmentalists, however, say the rules allow exemptions for two major groups of producers.
The first is low-volume oil wells known as “stripper wells.” They would not have to reduce two types of pollutants produced with methane — volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides. The two chemical classes can combine to form ground-level ozone, which has been shown to be harmful to human health.
Prior to 2018, stripper wells accounted for about 20 percent of the oil and gas production in New Mexico, the Associated Press reported.
“Those sites really won’t be getting adequate inspections, and that means unnecessary harmful emissions because they will have leaks and those leaks won’t get fixed,” said David McCabe, a senior scientist with the Boston-based Clean Air Task Force.
The second exemption is for facilities that emit less than 15 tons of volatile organic compounds annually.
Without the exemptions, the rules are “quite good,” Goldstein said.
But allowing facilities to skip quarterly reports and opt out of fixing leaks under the threshold outlined in the rules would make them “among the weakest standards in the country,” he added.
Major questions also remain about how and whether the state’s Oil Conservation Division will enforce the new requirements, said Tom Singer of the Western Environmental Law Center. The agency would be responsible for overseeing a 98 percent reduction in methane venting and flaring.
Singer expressed criticism of the division for not enforcing rules already on the books during prior administrations. “The agency just hasn’t enforced them, forever,” he said.
“We don’t want it to be up to the agency to get off their chair and go enforce something,” Singer added.
The concern, he said, is that companies could simply continue to violate the rules by factoring in fines as part of “the cost of doing business” in New Mexico.
Reducing methane is a key component of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s executive order on climate change. She ordered the state’s two environmental regulatory agencies to create rules to curb emissions.
The amount of methane released into the atmosphere annually in the state is equivalent to the emissions of 22 coal plants, according to the Environmental Defense Fund. New Mexico currently has two coal plants.
The Permian Basin accounts for twice the average amount of methane emitted from 11 other major U.S. oil and gas production regions in the country, according to an April report from scientists at Harvard University, Georgia Tech, the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research and the Environmental Defense Fund.
An analysis the Environmental Defense Fund released this week says 1 in 10 methane flares in the Permian Basin failed, venting unburned methane directly into the atmosphere.
The state’s draft methane rules do not address this problem, the Environmental Defense Fund claims.
“The fact that we have not seen any improvement in flare performance over three separate surveys tells us that industry and regulators need to get much more serious about the problem,” David Lyon, a scientist with the organization, said in a statement. “The best solution is to eliminate routine flaring altogether.”
According to satellite data, Permian oil and gas companies flared about 280 billion cubic feet of gas in 2019. The gas would have been worth about $420 million, the Environmental Defense Fund said, and “more than enough to supply every home in Texas.”